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March 2010 |
‘Gastric bypass surgery saved my life’
 Gary Carter, 45, a care worker from Seaford, East Sussex, explains how he went from being a suicidally depressed, morbidly obese person with diabetes to the healthy, happy Man is he today. One black day four years ago, I sat on the seafront feeling at my lowest ever. I could not see a way out, a way to change my life and be happy. I bitterly hated being big, but couldn’t stop eating. I sent a text message to my wife Sylvia, my dad, my brother and my sister, and then I turn off my phone and headed to the edge of the cliff at beachy Head. I was ready to through myself off and die.
My weight struggle begun when I was 11 and started getting bullied at school. I was on the small side and noticed the bullies didn’t beat up the big guys – deliberately putting on weight. At first my strategy worked, and then, as I became big, the bulling turned psychological, the bullish calling me ‘fatty’. But by now, food had become my comfort. I’d buy a couple of crisps, or crackling of chips from the chip shop, on the way from school, then go home and have a meal.
By adulthood, I was so fat up with being big. When I married my wife, Sylvia, who I met at 26, I promised her I’d lose weight. I tried so many times – I’d lose 4 stone over a few months, but then my weight loss would slow down, people would stop commenting on my weight loss, and I had think ‘But I like eating fast food’ and give up the diet. That, in turn, of course, made me more depressed. I had no energy and felt very lethargic. It was nothing for me to eat six packets of crisps a day at work and endless biscuits, cakes and chocolate bars. If I went out for a work meeting, I’d have had three slices of cakes in the coffee shop; I couldn’t pass a newsagent’s without going in and buying several packets of crisps and chocolate bars.
Sylvia tried her utmost stop me overeating, but she didn’t know I was lying to her. After our home-cooked dinner, I’d say ‘I’m just going for a walk’. I’d head out and secretly buy fish and chips, a burger and chocolate bars, then come home stuffed. Six year ago I began to feel constantly thirsty – I’d come home from work and get through two 4-litre of cola during the evening – and started to half dozen times in the night to go to the toilet. When I went to the doctor, I was weight at 25 ½ stone at 6ft 1in and my blood glucose was 24.1 – I had diabetes. But I was out of control. Though I didn’t weigh myself again, I kept gaining weight.
The only time I didn’t have people starting at me in disgust and where I could buy clothes in shops which fitted was when I visited America, where so many people were huge. At home, I had to buy my XXXXXL clothes mail-order – I felt an outcast. On holiday, I couldn’t take my T- shirt off for the through of the looks I’d get. I’d overhear people saying things like ‘Surely he knows what he looks like’. I joked about my size, but it was all an act – deep down, I was in very bad place. Clinically depressed about my life, I finally decided to commit suicide. That seemed the only way to get out of all hurt and despair blotting out everything else. As I sat on Beachy Head preparing to throw myself off, suddenly a nice policeman grabbed hold of me.
I then spent four weeks in the psychiatric ward at Eastbourne District General Hospital. A complete change While there, I made the decision to leave my job as an office manager – I wanted to go into care work. Once I started to working with adult with profound learning difficulties, I never looked back; I wished I’d done it years earlier. That was the first change I made to be happier; the second was gastric bypass surgery. It was a life threatening operation, but as it was, my life was already at risk.
I’d heard it could help with weight loss and managing diabetes for people who, like me, had been unable to loss weight through diet. I fitted all the criteria and my GP arranged for me to have it on the NHS. For ten days before the operation, I had to go on a strict diet to empty my stomach and shrink my lever to make the surgery safe. I had just 2 pints of milk and 2 pints of water a day, in the form of tea and coffee, vegetable broth from a cube in water, and a sugar-free jelly – I actually found it easy. It’s funny, but as soon I was preparing for the operation, I no longer wanted burgers, or fish and chips or pork pies. I was determined for the operation to work.
On 18 November 2008, I had the surgery – and my life changed. They made a hole in my belly, removed my gallbladder to avoid gallstones which can otherwise occur, then created a bypass in my intestine, stapling across the top of my stomach to reduce it from the size of four or five melons (the size of normal person’s stomach is that the one melon, but as I was so overweight, mine was so bigger), to the size of a yogurt pot. The first meal I had, three days after the op. was a tiny bowl of soup in a butter dish sized bowl and eggcupful of jelly, and I knew things would be different from then on. As well as becoming full faster, there were certain foods I couldn’t eat anymore – in my case, when I eat meat, rice, pasta or fatty foods, or if I overeat anything, I feel sick and throw up half an hour later. For instance, if I eat a standard serving of ice cream, I’m okay, but if I eat that after eating something else, or increase the portion, it make me sick. I now eat about half a saucerful of food for a meal-about six chips, or half a potato, mashed.
The idea is that I eat enough to keep me healthy, but little enough to lose 10 to 12 stone in two years, and once I reach my target weight, I’ll maintain it. For me the weight loss was more or less instant – I lost a stone in two weeks and soon my colleagues were doing double-takes and nicknamed me ‘the incredible shrinking man’. People had not seen for a while walked right past me and I to go and introduce myself. I now weigh 15st 5lbs-having lost over 10 stone in just over a year-but I still want to lose another couple of
stone.
I’ve been completely of my diabetes medication since the day of the operation - my surgeon told me that most of his patient no longer needed medication for diabetes after words. I took my last metformin tablet a few hours before I went on the operating table, and since operation my glucose has been constantly lowering. After coming of the hospital, five days after the op. it was down to 7.8 and it is now 4.3. I need only now a check-up once a year and have been told I essentially no longer have diabetes. The surgery was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I look in the mirror now and like what I see. When I down the high street today, people smile at me. I don’t feel like a blob anymore – I finally feel like myself, Gary. The day of operation was the last day I took any antidepressants. I still have the odd stressed-out day, like everyone does, but my depression has lifted as I like now myself.
I rarely eat unless I’m hungry anymore, because if I do, I’m soon in the bathroom being seek, which act as aversion therapy to wanting to overeat. Also the smaller I get, the better I feel about myself and the less I want to overeat. When I look back now at the way I used to eat, I do not miss it at all. I think ‘How could I have done that?’ Looking at pictures of how I used to look has made me cry.
I cycle to and from work – before the operation, it use to take me 35 minutes and then half an hour to recover before I could even speak. Now it takes me just over 5 minutes. And I’m not even out of breath. I’m planning to join a gym, and Sylvia is thrilled with the new me – she now call me her ‘hunky fella’ and loves showing me off. And I can’t wait to go on holiday and take my T-shirt off!
Thinking back now to that fateful day on Beachy Head, I’m so glad that copper pulled me back from the edge. Obesity is an illness and it can feel like there is no help out there – but there is, and I hope any readers who feel as lost as I once did will see a way forward in my story.
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